Antithesis: First-Principles Approaches to Testing Ultra-Large State Spaces

​Marcus Hodgson from Antithesis will lead this exciting session on Deterministic Simulation Testing!

This session starts with a foundational question that might seem naive: why does software have bugs?

​We answer this question from first principles (hint: it’s not just because humans are bad at writing code) and then develop an argument about what it would take to design, build, debug, and deliver distributed systems that are substantially less-buggy than the norm we have come to expect in the industry.

​We’ll walk through instances of how deterministic simulation testing – the approach informed by this view of distributed systems engineering – has been used at companies from FoundationDB to TigerBeetle and others, and show, using etcd as an example, how it gets used to find distributed system bugs in the real world.

​Format:

• ​30 minutes of focused presentation

• ​20 minutes of open discussion and Q&A

​Pre-Reads:

1. What's the big deal about Deterministic Simulation Testing?, https://notes.eatonphil.com/2024-08-20-deterministic-simulation-testing.html

2. Building a Deterministic Hypervisor with bhyve - May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit, Watch on YouTube

3. Finding bugs in Raft implementations, https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/finding-bugs-in-raft-implementations

​4. Please join the Designing Ultra Large Scale Systems Discord: Join Discord Server

​The event will be in Classroom 1 on the Discord.